This invention relates to a low profile hardwood flooring strip and its method of manufacture. The end product resulting from the processes described below is a hardwood flooring strip having a nominal thickness of 5/16" and a nominal width of either 21/4 or 31/4". The strips are intended to be sold as a prefinished "nail-down" product. The product is indistinguishable from a conventional 3/4" inch-thick flooring product of the type typically installed at present. However, the lower profile offers a number of substantial advantages. First, because almost twice the floor coverage can be achieved with the same amount of wood, very substantial savings in wood resources are possible.
When installed as a aftermarket product to replace an existing floor, the low profile permits installation over a floor where conventional carpet and padding was previously installed without the need to raise door bottoms or provide transitions between the new hardwood floor and adjacent flooring of other types. This results in very substantial labor savings.
Prior art methods of producing low profile wood flooring include simply planing down fill-thickness boards with a substantial amount of resulting waste sawdust and very little actual saving in the wood used. The prior art also includes cutting over-thickness boards, typically with a thickness of approximately 1.25", widthwise with a bandsaw. A bandsaw-cut board has a very uneven cut surface which cannot be used even on the hidden surface of the board without substantial further planing. Both prior art processes are relatively slow, produce a relatively low quality product, and create bottlenecks in automated production lines which have high processing speeds. Prior art processes have not provided a means of precisely controlling the positioning of the blank from which the strip of flooring, where the wood is sufficiently thin at the beginning of the process to provide significant savings in material and waste. The present method uses the same full thickness stock material used to produce conventional full thickness flooring, thus permitting the same production line to be used up to the splitting process itself.
The present process utilizes counterrotating saw blades to "split" hardwood flooring material into very high quality low profile flooring strips at rates which are compatible with processing speeds of the other manufacturing processes. This is accomplished by very precisely controlling the position of the wood blank before, during and after the splitting process. The result is a prefinished floor manufactured to extremely close tolerances, and with square edges which fit flush in the same manner as "sand-in-place" flooring.